Abel Gance

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French film director Abel Gance (1889 - 1981) is best known for his historical epic "Napoléon va par Abel Gance", a silent film that employed every available film technique and was designed for viewing on three screens. Gance is regarded as a film pioneer, and one of the greatest directors in French film history.

Gance, a Paris native, was the illegitimate son of a wealthy physician, Abel Flamant, and a working - class mother, Francoise Perethon. He was raised by his mother and her boyfriend, Adolphe Gance, whom she would marry. Gance attended the Collège de Chantilly in Paris and the Collège Chaptal, also in Paris, where he received a baccalaureate in 1906.

Stage Ambitions

In early childhood, Gance wanted to become a playwright. His parents, however, wanted him to pursue a respectable career. Bowing to their pressure, he worked as a lawyer's clerk with the intention of pursuing a successful career in law. But his love of the theater proved too strong and he made his acting debut at the age of 19 with the Theatre Royal du Parc in Brussels. He also acted on the Paris stage. Eventually, he penned a verse tragedy, La Victoire de Samothrace, dedicated to stage actress Sarah Bernhardt. The play was about to be produced when World War I broke out in 1914, and forced its cancellation.

While waiting for his theatrical break, Gance turned to the movies. In 1909, in need of money, he made his debut in Moliere. Despite his low regard for film at the time, he performed in minor roles for the Gaumont studios, and even attempted screenwriting. During this period, life was hard for Gance. He lived in poverty and suffered from bouts of starvation and tuberculosis.

Became a Film Director

By 1911, Gance started directing films. He regained some of his health and formed a production company. His first film as a director, La Digue, was a failed attempt. None of Gance's earliest films survived, but an early short that still exists, La Folie du Docteur Tube (1915), revealed his innovative grasp of visual effects. Gance may have thought little of films, but liked experimenting with technique. In the short film, Gance used an anamorphic lens to tell the story of a mad scientist who uses a ray to distort people and everyday objects.

Gance's poor health kept him out of most of World War I, and he spent much of the period with the Film d'Art company, directing about a dozen films in 1916 and 1917. He directed two highly successful films, Mater Dolorosa (1917) and La Dixieme Symphonie (1918), but management soon regarded him as a wild experimenter with an eccentric visual style that included using close - ups and dolly shots, techniques still outside the film mainstream. In Mater Dolorosa, he used editing and camera technique to portray the inner thoughts of his characters.

The more he experimented, Gance fought frequently with company producers. However, the success of his works forced them to back off. Mater Dolorosa led to a series of other quality films that included Barberousse (1917) and La Zone de la Mort (1917).

Served on the Front Line

Gance was becoming one of the best known directors in France when he was called up for duty toward the end of World War I. He was placed at the front lines, where he suffered mustard - gas poisoning and almost died. He was discharged, but he asked to be redrafted so he could shoot on - location battle scenes for a project he was developing, the antiwar film J'accuse!. On August 25, 1918, Gance returned to the front with a camera crew and began shooting. The film, released in 1919, would be the first European production that showed real footage of the carnage of war.

J'accuse! was a three - hour epic and a huge box - office success in Europe. The story itself involved a rather conventional and melodramatic love triangle; Gance's methods included a rapid editing style that is said to have influenced the great Russian filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein. The film established Gance as France's leading film director.

Two Masterworks

Throughout the 1920s, Gance released only three films, but two were cinematic landmarks. He benefited from a time of great creative freedom for artists. In the 1920s, he experimented even more, pioneered editing and camerawork styles and introducing wide - screen and multi - screen techniques.

Between 1919 and 1921, Gance shot enormous amounts of film on location for his next project, La Roue. The story combined elements of the Oedipus and Sisyphus myths in a love - triangle story that involved an aging railroad engineer, his son, and a secretly adopted daughter/sister. During the final production stages, when Gance was editing the massive work, Gance's wife died from influenza. Distraught, Gance walked away from the film, much to the horror of producer Charles Pathée. The rough cut that Gance left behind was eight hours long.

During his absence, Gance traveled to the United States to promote J'accuse!, which was highly regarded there. Gance received a tempting offer to direct films for the Metro studio, but he did not like the Hollywood studio filmmaking system. The highlight of the trip was a visit with pioneering American filmmaker D.W. Griffith, who asked Gance to work at his film company, United Artists. Gance considered the offer, but returned to France four months after walking off La Roue. Pathée was still furious.

Gance was anxious to apply the new style of Hollywood editing to La Roue. When he had started work on the film, Gance had employed the French cinematic style of long takes. When he returned to work on the film, he spent a year re - editing what had been shot. The film was finally released in 1923, and audience and critics were stunned.

Even re - edited, the film still ran close to eight hours, and included a prologue and four parts. For general release in 1924, it was edited to 130 minutes. A restored version released in 1980 ran 303 minutes. This restored version enabled modern audiences to better view the overlaying of moving images and the rapid editing that made La Roue so historically important.

The film was enormously popular but, because of its length and its expensive production, it generated little profit. Indeed, at the time, La Roue was the most expensive film produced in France. Gance's financial backers began to worry about how his creativity would affect their investments.

But they had little to worry about from Gance's next film, Au secours!, alow - budget, two - reel comedy that took place in a haunted house. The modest film was a big hit and played in France for years. Now, the film is viewed as an insubstantial interlude between two cinematic masterworks.

In 1924, Gance began work on what would become his best - known and greatest film, Napoléon va par Abel Gance. Released in 1927, the epic recounted Napoleon's career from his childhood to the start of his Italian campaign. It included unprecedented visual effects that in some cases, never were used again. For the action scenes, Gance employed a three - camera process that involved three projectors and a curved, wide screen that produced a panoramic effect. The technique predated the wide - screen innovations of Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly "Cinerama," with its three screens. The film also featured mobile camera work, as cameras were mounted on horses or swings. The editing was typically rapid and the film seemed in constant motion.

When it premiered at the Paris Opera, it received a standing ovation. Its screenings, however, were restricted due to technical problems. Only eight European cities could show it, because of the equipment and theater size necessary. These technical matters, as well as the film's length, essentially destroyed its profitability. Because of its six - hour length, it could only run once a day, which upset theater owners.

Distributors constantly cut away at the film. By 1928, it had been pared to 180 minutes. In the United States, Metro - Goldywn - Mayer bought the distribution rights, but never showed the film in its wide - screen version. In addition, the studio severely cut the film and even rearranged sequences. As a result, its American release was a disaster. It received bad reviews and audiences laughed at it. (A 435 - minute "restored" version was finally shown in the United States in 1981).

The film would mark the last time Gance enjoyed total artistic freedom. His sound films were made for studios that restricted his independence. His producers told him they would limit his budgets. The technical innovation of sound itself added tighter production controls that further constrained Gance. His career would never return to the heights he achieved in the 1920s.

Career Went into Extended Decline

In the early 1930s, Gance was involved in several projects of note, but instead of innovating, he mostly remade sound versions of his silent films including Mater Dolorosa (1932) and J'accuse! (1937), or filmed adaptations of popular plays and novels. In 1931, he wanted to use his wide - screen process for a silent science - fiction film, Le fin du monde, about a comet that collided with the earth. But as costs skyrocketed, the producers grabbed control of the film, cut it from 93 to 55 minutes and dubbed in sound. In 1933, Gance used his own money to make asynchronized sound version of Napoléon va par Abel Gance, using an audio technology he had patented called "Sound Perspective." This multi - channel sound system sent specific sounds into specific speakers within a movie theater, and it was seven years ahead of the three - channel stereo phonic system the Walt Disney Company studios developed for Fantasia (1940). Despite the sound innovation, the project was a costly failure.

One of his more interesting projects was Lucrezia Borgia (1935), which was years ahead of its time with its frank depictions of sexuality and violence.

After Gance made Le Capitaine Fracasse in 1942, his career appeared to have ended. The following year, he had to flee France to avoid living under the German occupation. When he returned to France after more than a decade, he found that his prestige as a filmmaker had fallen considerably, due to the influential Cahiers du Cinema film journal and its group of writers who advanced new ideas about film. The writers felt Gance's historical dramas exhibited a right - wing fascism. When Gance released his last historical epic, The Battle of Austerlitz, in 1960, the writers intensified their critical assault.

Gance made his last feature, Cyrano et d'Artagnan, in 1964.

Reputation Restored

Gance lived long enough to enjoy the public's rediscovery of Napoléon va par Abel Gance. This was due an intensive, 25 - year restoration effort by English film historian Kevin Brownlow, who wanted to return the film to its 1927 running time. Results of his early efforts were shown at the New York Film Festival of 1964. This helped rehabilitate Gance's reputation.

In 1979, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola hired Brownlow to work on a 70 - millimeter reconstruction of the entire film for general release. The effort was a success, to the great delight of Gance. In 1981, Coppola screened the film, using the three - projector format, at Radio City Music Hall in New York.

That year, Gance died of a lung ailment on November 10 in Paris. He was 92. At the time of his death, he was planning an epic film about Christopher Columbus.

In 2001, Brownlow presented an improved reconstruction of the Napoleon epic. This led to a revival of Gance's other films.

Books

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 2: Directors (4th edition), St. James Press, 2000.

Monaco, James, et al, The Encyclopedia of Film, Perigree, 1991.

Tyler, Parker, Classics of the Foreign Film, Citadel Press, 1968.

Online

"Abel Gance," Yahoo! Movies, http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hc&id;=1800032707&cf;=biog&intl;=us (January 6, 2005).

"Biography for Abel Gance," International Movie Database,http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0304098/bio (January 6, 2005).

Gance, Abel (1889-1981). Probably the most imaginative, certainly the most grandiose French film director of the silent era. The eight-hour, three-screen Napoléon (1926) is filmed history (and the Napoleonic myth) at its most lyrically spectacular. The advent of sound and his Pétainist sympathies caused a decline of interest in his work, and for a long time Napoléon was available only in shortened versions until Kevin Brownlow succeeded in reconstructing a complete version in 1981. This, with live orchestral accompaniment, has been triumphantly screened to large audiences round the world.

[KAR]

• Born: Oct 25, 1889 in Abel Perethon, Paris, France
• Died: Nov 10, 1981 in Paris, France
• Occupation: Director, Writer, Actor
• Active: teens-'30s, '50s-'60s
• Major Genres: Drama, Historical Film
• Career Highlights: Napoléon, Abel Gance's Beethoven, La Roue
• First Major Screen Credit: Le Portrait de Mireille (1909)

Biography

Abel Gance was the major figure among directors in 1920s French film, and among the most ambitious visionaries of the silent cinema. Fueled by literary ambitions from childhood, Gance began working as an actor at the age of 19, with the ambition of breaking into playwriting. In 1909, Gance managed to get a job writing movie scenarios for Gaumont and, by 1911, was directing them. None of Gance's earliest films survive, but his first viewable effort demonstrates that he was already pioneering the use of unusual visual effects. In the short La Folie du Docteur Tube (1915), Gance uses an anamorphic lens to illustrate the story of a mad doctor who uses a ray to twist everyday objects and people out of shape. Gance gained his first good notices from critics with Mater Dolorosa (1917), a genuine tragedy without a "happy ending," relatively rare in French cinema of the day. With this film, Gance began to use editing and camerawork to project the interior thoughts of his characters.

The success of Mater Dolorosa precipitated a string of hits for Gance, including Barberousse (Red Beard, 1917), La Zone de la Mort (1917), and La Dixième Symphonie (The Tenth Symphony, 1918). In the midst of all this, Gance was mobilized to the front lines of the First World War, gassed, and nearly killed. On August 25, 1918, Gance returned to the front with a camera crew and began shooting his first major epic, an antiwar film entitled J'accuse! (1919). Gance takes a conventional love triangle and expands it into a grand tapestry that encompasses the evil horror of the "Great War," utilizing the actual battlefront itself as a stage. J'accuse! was a huge success worldwide and made Gance's reputation.

Between 1919 and 1921, Gance shot millions of meters of film, all on location, on his next project, La Roue. This was a highly convoluted mixture of the Oedipus and Sisyphus myths, centering on a love triangle between an aging railroad engineer, his young son, and the secretly adopted daughter/sister who grew up within their family. Just as Gance got started cutting La Roue, his own young wife died of tuberculosis. Much to the shock of Gance's silent partner, producer Charles Pathé, Gance promptly got up and walked away from the film, leaving it behind in a rough cut some eight hours in length. Gance then traveled to America, basking in the attention surrounding J'accuse!, paying a visit to his idol, D.W. Griffith, and briefly entertaining the idea of working at United Artists. After four months, Gance returned to France to his furious producer.

Reports vary as to how long La Roue finally ran upon its appearance in 1922, but the "restored" 1980 version of 303 minutes seems close to the mark; it is most commonly seen today in the 1924 general-release version of 130 minutes. This version contains most of the essentials of this historically important film -- Gance's radical overlaying of moving images such as railroad tracks, rapid cutting, and mental/visual associations. In one scene in the instant before a character falls to his death from a cliff, his life flashes before his eyes (and the viewer's) in single frames. Gance had discovered "Russian editing" before the Russians did. The immediate impact and immense popularity of La Roue was unprecedented for a film made in France. Nonetheless, it was a very expensive production; its long screen time and delayed production made it hard for La Roue to turn a profit. Gance's backers began to wonder, even at this early stage, how much his artistic independence was going to cost them.

With his next film, all those concerns were temporarily delayed. Au secours! (Help!, 1923) was a low budget two-reel haunted-house comedy starring Max Linder. This film was a huge smash and played in French cinemas for years, and it would prove a last hurrah for the ill-fated Linder, who shortly thereafter died by his own hand. In 1924, Gance began to map out the production that would ultimately define his career, Napoléon vu par Abel Gance. This was a grand historical epic covering Napoléon's career from childhood to the brink of the Italian campaign. While in historical terms Gance's Napoléon would be presented with little depth or complexity, the result would be rich in visual effects never seen before, and in some cases not since. The screen would be divided into many parts during action scenes, and into "tryptichs" presaging wide-screen formats, called "Polyvision" by Gance. Cameras were mounted on horses, swings, sent plunging into crowds or seen taking in huge panoramic vistas. Gance's editing was as razor-tight as ever, and the action onscreen constantly kept in motion. Napoléon was completed in 1927 and shown in the capitals of Europe to unanimous acclaim. It was also one of the longest films on record; early screenings are rumored to have run some six hours, although the 435-minute "restored" 1981 cut overseen by Kevin Brownlow is believed to be within a minute or two of the original length. By 1928, it was already reduced to 180 minutes. Despite its technical mastery and the sheer amount of audacious genius that went into making Napoléon, the long screen time worked against its profitability, as it could only be showed once a day. Very few theaters wanted to commit to showing a film of this length. Over time, increasingly more of Napoléon was whittled away, and in the end it was completely pulled apart for the benefit of stock-shot libraries. In its original form, it never turned a profit.

Gance was convinced that his wide-screen "Polyvision" process represented the future of filmmaking. After making a short demonstrating the Polyvision principle, Gance embarked on another full-length Polyvision film, Le fin du monde (The End of the World, 1931). This was to have been a silent science-fiction film in which a comet would have been shown hurtling across three screens, slamming into the earth. With costs running out of control, producers L'Ecran d'Art pulled the plug on the film, added poorly dubbed sound, cut it from 93 to 55 minutes, and eliminated the Polyvision sequences. In 1933, Gance made, at his own expense, a synchronized sound version of Napoléon that made use of an audio technology he had patented with André Debrie called "Sound Perspective." This was a multi-channel sound system that was capable of sending specific sounds into specific speakers within a movie theater, far more advanced than the three-channel stereophonic system Disney developed for Fantasia ("Fantasound") six years later. But this sound version of Napoléon proved an expensive failure.

It is often said about Gance that he "never made the transition to sound film," a curious statement about a director who continued to work on soundstages until 1963. Dialogue did tend to slow the pacing of his films down, sometimes to a veritable crawl, and his handling of talky scenes hearkens back to his early grounding in stage traditions. But Gance's output after 1927 is dramatically different from what went before, being much more generally uneven in terms of quality. What changed was not so much the added technology of sound, but Gance's relationship with his producers. They made it clear to Gance that they were not going to continue to make an exception for him in terms of budgets, and that he was expected to keep within his parameters whether or not it impacted the artistic outcome of the film. While Gance's younger contemporaries, such as Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo, flourished under tight budgets and short shooting schedules, Gance viewed it as a personal assault on his integrity as an artist. Unlike Erich Von Stroheim, who reached the same crossroads with Queen Kelly (1928) and proceeded to wear out his welcome with the failed Walking Down Broadway (1932), Gance decided to give his producers what he thought they wanted, and curtail his talent to fit their requirements.

Throughout the 1930s, Gance accepted a number of mediocre projects that really weren't worthy of his time. There were a few exceptions; Lucrezia Borgia (1935) would easily earn an R-rating today through its frank depictions of sexuality, violence, and torture. Gance also remade several of his hit films from the silent period. The sound version of J'accuse! (1937) has a conclusion which is so effective that your hair will stand on end, that is, if you can make it through the grindingly slow first hour of exposition. Some other Gance efforts of the 1930s, however, are barely watchable -- Un Grand Amour de Beethoven (1936) never gets off the ground, hampered by its leaden pacing, the overtly melodramatic acting of Harry Baur, and Gance's own heavy-handed use of the "fate motive" of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony at literally every dramatic turn of the story.

By 1943, Gance was forced to flee France in order to avoid the German occupation and its deadly Vichy government. This kept Gance out of the film industry altogether for more than a decade. When he returned, the situation was entirely different -- the Cahiers du Cinéma group, with its notions of the "Nouvelle Vague," were swiftly becoming a force to reckoned with in French Cinema. They viewed Gance's deliberately pretentious historical dramas as a sort of right-wing fascism that was beneath contempt. Gance's final historical epic, The Battle of Austerlitz (1960), came under particular fire from the Cahiers cinéastes, who practically accused Gance of making films that were Nazi-sympathetic. Under such circumstances, Gance decided to keep a low profile, working infrequently in films until he achieved his final edit of Napoléon, entitled Bonaparte et la Revolution (1971). Even this is a bit of a curiosity, given its added scenes, benign narration, and running time of less than a quarter of the original Napoléon's screen time.

Behind the scenes, English film enthusiast Kevin Brownlow had begun by 1954 to assemble a collection of shots from Napoléon from a variety of sources ranging from Pathé Ciné-baby 9.5 mm prints to partial 35 mm Polyvision segments. Brownlow's intention was to return Napoléon to its 1927 running time, and the results of his first efforts toward this end were shown at the New York Film Festival of 1964. The underground New York filmmakers realized that Gance's single-frame cutting and other radical visual effects were right in line with their own work, and Gance's reputation as an avant-gardist was gradually reaffirmed to him in English-speaking lands. In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola engaged Brownlow to spearhead a major 70 mm format reconstruction of the complete Napoléon for general release, an unprecedented step in the recovery of silent era films. This was an immediate success, and a delight to Gance himself, who lived just long enough to witness the news of Napoléon's revival and renewed worldwide acclaim.

In 2001, Kevin Brownlow introduced an "improved" reconstruction of Napoléon, and one by one Gance's other films were being revived. In some cases it's an uphill battle; Gance is about as bad as "bad" gets. Nonetheless, if Napoléon was the only film Abel Gance had ever made, he would still be regarded as one of the major French filmmakers of all time, and thus there is reason to believe that his other films may yield visual treasures yet unknown. After seeing J'accuse! and Gance's treatment of the war, a subject that has perhaps suffered from clumsy interpretation more than any event, one instinctively knows there is something in this young French producer that is not ordinary. He thinks on a plane not usual in the best of motion picture circles, and he understands the spiritual power of the cinema. His idea is to portray on the screen what the eye cannot see -- to put it more simply, to give people something to think about and not to have their mental labors performed for them. ~ David Lewis, All Movie Guide

Napoléon Buy this Movie

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Abel Gance's Beethoven Buy this Movie

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